The Wire’s Aidan Gillen is back, playing a detective on the trail of stolen
identities.

When you look through Aidan Gillen’s CV it’s impossible to detect a pattern. This, says the 42-year-old actor, is intentional. ‘I don’t have a plan. In fact, having no plan is the plan. I’m always trying to reinvent myself. That’s what actors are supposed to do, isn’t it?’

Most viewers will recognise Gillen from one of two standout roles. In 1999 he starred as Stuart, a promiscuous ad exec, in Queer as Folk, Russell T Davies’s landmark drama about life in Manchester’s gay scene. In 2004 he switched continents and accents to play Tommy Carcetti, an ambitious yet principled politician in the similarly groundbreaking HBO drama The Wire. Both were superb performances, yet I watched three series of The Wire without recalling where I’d seen Gillen before. He has that happy – and surprisingly rare – knack among actors of making you remember his characters but forget the man who played them.

This chameleon-like ability makes Gillen a perfect fit for Identity, a new six-part ITV drama inspired by one of the 21 century’s more unnerving crimes: identity theft. He stars alongside Keeley Hawes (Ashes to Ashes) as DI John Bloom, a former undercover cop who is a genius at unmasking identity thieves because he has spent most of his professional (and at times private) life masquerading as other people.

According to its writer, Ed Whitmore (He Kills Coppers), Identity isn’t merely about fake passports and stolen Pin numbers. ‘The whole proposition of identity has never felt more fluid and perilous, and that’s reflected in the burgeoning identity fraud crime stats,’ he says. ‘But it also poses deeper questions, such as, “What does our identity really mean to us?”’

For the most part, however, Whitmore’s script wisely avoids existential debates on the nature of self in favour of snappily plotted whodunits. When it succeeds, it does so by convincing the viewer that it’s now easier for a would-be criminal to steal a man’s identity than it is his hat. Gillen, though, isn’t worried that this fate might befall him.

‘A lot of actors have people on Facebook setting up profiles and pretending to be them,’ he says. ‘And I believe there was a man who passed himself off as Robert De Niro for years, with credit cards and everything. I don’t think I’ll have a problem, though. I’m not that famous.’ (This sort of self-effacing aside is typical. Gillen regularly interrupts himself with charmingly unnecessary apologies, such as ‘This is a long, waffling answer, sorry’ and ‘Does that tell you what you wanted? I’m not sure it does’.)

He may not be worried by identity theft, but Gillen is regularly mistaken for someone he’s not – an American. Thanks to his compelling turn as the Mayor of Baltimore in The Wire, some members of the public are startled to discover he speaks with a pleasing Irish brogue. He doesn’t blame them for being duped, though. He had a similar problem himself. ‘When I met Idris Elba [who plays drug kingpin Stringer Bell in the series], it took me a long while to realise that he was from London. And that was me being fooled by his accent – I was in the show!’

Some actors don’t like to dwell for long on former glories, especially if they overshadow their more recent work. Not so Gillen, who is sanguine at the thought that The Wire might be the pinnacle of his television career. ‘It definitely raised the bar, which you can look at in two ways. You can say, “Is anything else I do going to be as good?” Or maybe, by setting a standard, The Wire will make everything else get a bit better. There’s a lot of reality TV around these days and it’s nice to see a straight drama making an impact. You can still find good television dramas but there’s not as many as there used to be. When I was 16, there were loads of good things on: The Singing Detective, Boys from the Blackstuff… They were a big influence on me wanting to become an actor.’

Inspired by Dennis Potter and The Singing Detective, Gillen began his career in the theatre, in Dublin. He may seem shy during our interview, but as a young aspiring actor he wasn’t afraid to try his luck. To get his breakthrough role in Billy Roche’s A Handful of Stars he says he virtually ‘ambushed’ the playwright in the street and demanded to be auditioned. His film debut in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, starring Maggie Smith, came as result of ‘gate-crashing’ the set. ‘I wouldn’t want to romanticise it,’ he says, ‘but at the start of lots of careers you’re always hustling a bit, using your initiative to get some attention.’

These days Gillen gets ample attention, and is able to cherry-pick his roles. Now dividing his time between the US and County Kerry, where he lives with his wife and two children, he prefers to alternate between performing in the theatre, on television and in film. His only plan may be not to have one, but there is one thread which connects his consciously scattergun career.

‘I’m always attracted to bold, risk-taking scripts,’ he says. ‘Both The Wire and Queer as Folk had a big scope. They were panoramas, telling ambitious stories about two cities, Baltimore and Manchester, for the first time. Some people said that Queer as Folk was sensationalist and had too much sex. The real mayor of Baltimore complained that The Wire was too bleak. But they’re missing the point. Both David Simon and Russell T Davies obviously loved the worlds they were writing about.

‘In drama you can either pretend everything is OK, or you can show the world as it really is in the hope that it gets better.’